When you can't supply enough seats at the wages you're willing to pay, raise the caps in those classes. When that still doesn't do the trick, pay some of the faculty to work an overload.

When you need still more seats at a yet cheaper price, decide that the overload (with the raised caps, but minus the additional compensation) should become standard practice, and that faculty teaching your gateway classes no longer need to do service (i.e. think or talk to each other about what they're doing, and why, and the effect of their choices on the student experience).

Wash, rinse, repeat until -- the faculty finally quit? students stop entering grad school and the faculty who were teaching grad classes become available to teach freshman comp? all but the sharpest, most independent first-year students drift vaguely away? the retention software (and/or retention office/dean) implode(s)? ???????

*One of things I like about this article is that it mentions the long-ignored ADE and CCCC recommendations that a writing teacher's load be no more than 2-3 classes of 15-20 students, for a total of no more than 60 students per term. Sadly, it also relates that the CCCC has now removed those numbers from its guidelines. It's generally an excellent article, with an unusually high density of thoughtful quotes from various interviewees, and useful links, including one to a petition. Even the comments (so far) are mostly pretty good.

9 comments:

I was hoping people would at least have colorful/amusing/hyperbolically apocalyptic end-game scenarios to suggest, but apparently, yes, we're going down with barely a whimper rather than a bang.

I suspect we're all too exhausted from grading all the extra papers that show up with those ever-rising course caps to be very creative, or even reactive, at this point (which may have something to do with why this change was announced at this particular time of year).

My slowness in commenting was due to needing time to produce something worthy of the issue (as you can see, still haven't had time).However, I really didn't want it to slip from the first page with no comments whatsoever.

Our SLAC is planning a new science building (yay!), but the administration wants to plan it so there are 24 students in a lab section. The architects looked at them like they were insane, and asked why a small college wants to run their labs just like Giant State University.

Are you doing it with TAs? If not, you have my sympathies. I used to have 24 students in a lab section in grad school, and all I had time to do was look out for students doing things that were actively dangerous.

What Was This?

College Misery was a dysfunctional group blog where professors got the chance to release some of the frustration that built up while tending to student snowflakes, helicopter parents, money mad Deans, envious colleagues, and churlish chairpeople.

Our parent site, Rate Your Students, started in 2005, and we continued that mission beginning in 2010. Ben at Academic Water Torture and Kimmie at The Apoplectic Mizery Maker both ran support blogs during periods when this blog had died.